May 2019 / N o. 12 p aul-mellon - c e ntre.a c.uk
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art is an educational charity committed to promoting original research into the history of British art and architecture. It is a part of Yale University and its activities and resources include research events, public lectures, publications, fellowships, grants programmes, and a library and archival collection. PMC Notes, the Centre’s newsletter, is published three times per year.
PMC Staff Director of Studies Mark Hallett Deputy Director for Grants and Publications Martin Postle Deputy Director for Finance and Administration Sarah Ruddick Deputy Director for Research Sarah Victoria Turner Librarian Emma Floyd Archivist and Records Manager Charlotte Brunskill Assistant Librarian Natasha Held Assistant Archivist and Records Manager Jenny Hill Cataloguer: Auction Catalogues Mary Peskett Smith Archive Project Cataloguer Anthony Day Archive Project Cataloguer Matthew Waters Digital Manager Tom Scutt Digital Officer Alice Read Events Manager (Maternity Cover) Tom Knowles Office Manager Suzannah Pearson Education Programme Manager Nermin Abdulla Fellowships, Grants, and Communications Manager Harriet Fisher Editor Baillie Card
HR Manager Barbara Waugh Office Administrator Stephen O’Toole Buildings Officer George Szwejkowski Senior Research Fellow Hammad Nasar Research Fellow and Filmmaker Jonathan Law Advisory Council Christopher Breward, National Galleries of Scotland Tarnya Cooper, National Trust Anthony Geraghty, University of York Julian Luxford, University of St Andrews David Mellor, University of Sussex Martin Myrone, Tate Britain Lynda Nead, Birkbeck Christine Riding, Royal Museums Greenwich Andrew Saint, English Heritage MaryAnne Stevens, Art Historian and Curator Nicholas Tromans, Christies Education Simon Wallis, The Hepworth Gallery Board of Governors Peter Salovey, President of Yale University Ben Polak, Provost of Yale University Amy Meyers, Director of Yale Center for British Art Stephen Murphy, Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer of Yale University Design
Editor Emily Lees
Baillie Card and Harriet Fisher Template by Cultureshock Media Printed by CPG
Editorial Assistant Tom Powell
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Contents May 2019 – No.12
Director’s Note The Story of Inventing Boston Interview: Reactivating the British Art Network Strawberry Hill’s Missing Portrait New Books, Summer 2019 PMC Events Calendar YCBA Events Calendar
Cover a detail from: Christening blanket, wrought by Mary Fifield, ca. 1713, fustian ground with wool crewel work in buttonhole, chain, cross, and knot stitches. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (gift of Miss Mary Avery White, 30.448). Photograph © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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Director’s Note Energising spring breezes are rustling around Bedford Square as I write, and the Centre is gearing up for a summer and autumn of lively activity. Among many other events and enterprises, 2019 will see the PMC embarking upon two new collaborative initiatives, both of which are designed to further our aim of supporting original research and productive discussion on all aspects of British art. First of all, we are proud to be making a major contribution to the continuing development of the British Art Network (BAN), which over the last few years has fostered the sharing of knowledge and expertise between curators, academics, and researchers from across the UK. Working closely with colleagues at Tate, and with the added benefit of generous funding from Arts Council England, we intend to help BAN move into an even more active phase of its history. In particular, we hope to support the growth of a thriving research culture among the wider curatorial community in Britain’s museums and galleries. As is well known, this community is facing huge challenges at present, thanks to the devastating impact of financial cuts and political neglect on the statefunded arts sector. BAN will provide curators with a forum in which they can share their research, exchange ideas on best practice, and meet their fellow professionals—including university-based art historians—from both
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inside and outside the museum sector. We believe we can help give BAN a higher, more public profile, and make it a vital space for the sharing of knowledge and ideas on the part of a brilliant but embattled curatorial community. This coming July, meanwhile, will witness the launch of a second major initiative for the Centre—an annual two-week graduate summer school that has been developed in collaboration with the Yale School of Art, the Yale History of Art department, the Yale Center for British Art, and London’s Institute for Contemporary Art. The Summer School is intended to provide the opportunity for graduate art students and art historians to learn from each other, and for Yale students to spend time with their UKbased peers and other members of the British art community. It will also provide a forum for stimulating discussion and debate on a theme—this year, the concept of the artist collective—that is of interest to both art students and art history students, of relevance in relation to historic and contemporary art, and investigated through the prism of British artistic and architectural practice. Finally, it is designed to bring together the creative and intellectual energy of all the participating institutions, and to enable us all to develop areas of common interest. Building on our longstanding Yale in London programme, which provides Yale undergraduate students with the chance to study at the PMC, this new scheme will, we hope, provide a unique opportunity for graduate students from two adjacent disciplines to inspire each other with their ideas and energy. We also hope that it will generate conversations and friendships that will last for years to come. Finally, and on another note entirely, I am delighted to report that our PMC online publication, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769-2018, has won the 2019 People’s Voice Award in its category of General Websites—Art at the annual Webby Awards. The Webby Awards, which have been described by The New York Times as “the Internet’s highest honor” are immensely prestigious, and it is thrilling to see our name up in lights in this way. Many congratulations are due to all those involved in this amazing publication, including our designers Charlotte Strick and Claire Williams Martinez and our scores of contributors; and many thanks, too, to all those of you who voted for the Chronicle this month. Exciting times!
Mark Hallett Director of Studies
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The Story of Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Charles F. Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts at Yale University, reflects on the questions and curiosities that shaped his new book with the Paul Mellon Centre about the interconnected histories of material culture in colonial America.
Inventing Boston
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Waistcoat, fabric woven in London and tailored in Boston, ca. 1720, brocaded satin, silk damask, gold metallic braid, taffeta, linen. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (gift of William Storer Eaton, 41.887). Photograph Š 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
January 2016 — No. 5
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T
he development of Inventing Boston follows my own path in thinking about colonial America. I was drawn to a particular point in time—between the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries—that had often been overlooked by scholars of American material culture. Much previous work had focused upon the material world constructed by the first generations of settler colonists or the genteel lifestyles of the Revolutionary generations. A few isolated or medium-specific studies of the silver or cane chairs of this period had suggested a compelling story of awareness, adaptation, and creativity as Boston forged its own identity, related to but distinct from Britain. Initially I sought to investigate local production of case furniture because I wanted to understand the impact of immigrant cabinetmakers and why Boston was the colonial center for japanned furniture, as well as why the work first produced during the early eighteenth century had such an impact on New England furniture production throughout the remainder of the century. So I began with the intensive study of objects made in colonial Boston by inhabitants of Boston. Such an inward focus, upon Boston-made furniture, is characteristic of much American furniture and silver scholarship. Collections and exhibitions typically celebrate the objects made in America to argue for regional stylistic developments on this side of the Atlantic. Yet close study of an object like the high chest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals small details that attest to the technical sophistication that must have been learned in a London shop. So the story is more than a simple example of local production: it is a form developed in Britain made of local materials in a shop run by a recent arrival. It is truly an Anglo-American piece of furniture.
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Opposite top: High chest of drawers, Boston, 1690–1700, black walnut, burl maple veneer, curly maple, eastern white pine. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1909).
Bottom left: Bottle, Frechen, ca. 1660, wheelthrown stoneware with sprig molded decoration and salt glaze. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Bottom right: Edward Winslow, chocolate pot, Boston, ca. 1705, raised silver body with repoussé chased, cast, and engraved decoration. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Alphonso T. Clearwater. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.
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Left: Fragment of a dress, woven in Spitalfields, London, ca. 1720, compound silk weave. Originally owned in the Hutchinson Family. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (gift of Miss Lois Lilley Howe, Rev. Henry Pomeroy Horton, and Mr. Charles Dabney Horton in memory of Miss Elizabeth Howe Horton and Miss Aimee Alsop Horton, 41.772a). Photograph © 2019 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
I also wanted to include the study of imported objects into the story of Boston’s material world, so I developed a chapter on ceramics. The inhabitants of the port town enjoyed many different choices for consumer decisions, and ceramics afforded the ideal medium to explore a spectrum of possibilities. Local production consisted mainly of everyday leadglazed earthenware, but the town imported a wide range of ceramics. In spite of British attempts to control trade through the Navigation Acts, Bostonians gained direct access to a wide variety of ceramics from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Portugal. A salt-glazed stoneware bottle, produced in the Cologne area of Germany, represents the most sophisticated European ceramics of the last half of the seventeenth century. Boston inhabitants acquired these bottles either through trade with British merchants or coastal trade with Dutch merchants and used them as liquid storage vessels as well as witch’s bottles, filled with nail clippings, hair, and urine to ward off evil spirits. They sought out these products of an advanced production and distribution system, and then deployed them in a variety of ways. As I integrated the stories of local production and imports, I realized there was a third category—imported items that served as raw materials to which local artisans could add value. Textiles are the ultimate example of this category. Tailors or upholsterers would cut and sew cloth to produce clothing, bed hangings, and upholstered furniture. A waistcoat owned by Ebenezer Storer features sophisticated silks designed and woven in Spitalfields and silk damask likely woven in Norwich, which a Boston tailor assembled for Storer. The transformation of such imported material provides yet another example of how objects in America had multiple sources. Ultimately, the story of Inventing Boston is more than a simple local story of self-invention that highlights objects made in Boston, but rather a broad contextual study that situates Boston within a wider Atlantic world, ranging from London and Portugal to the Caribbean and New France. As an interconnected history, it analyzes and interprets a range of objects made, imported, or transformed in Boston.
Lobed dish, London, 1675–90, cobalt painted tin-glazed earthenware. Found at the Hitchcock archaeological site, Saco, Maine. Saco Museum (gift of the Tito family). Photo: Leslie Rounds.
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Reactivating the British Art Network: Championing Curatorial Research The British Art Network is a Subject Specialist Network bringing together professionals working on British art including curators, researchers, and academics, reflecting the combined strength of the UK’s public collections and curatorial expertise in this field. The Network is entering an exciting new phase of development, which will see the Paul Mellon Centre working closely in partnership with Tate to expand the Network and develop its full potential. Building on the success of the Network to date, it will organise a programme of lectures, seminars, and conferences, as well as development opportunities for early career curators. In this interview, Steering Committee members Lucy Bamford, Senior Curator of Fine Art and the Joseph Wright Collection, Derby Museums, and Professor Fiona Kearney, Director of the Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, speak to PMC Editor Baillie Card about the knowledge exchange, advocacy, and collaboration enabled by the British Art Network.
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Baillie: When did you each become involved with the British Art Network? Fiona: I’m a new member of the Steering Committee, and had my first meeting in London in March. It seems to be a very interesting phase of the Network. Its openness to accepting propositions from groups seems a democratic and perceptive way to learn from the community about which areas perhaps require some intelligence gathering. There is also an extraordinary generosity in the recommitment of funding, and in terms of expanding the Network to include someone like myself—an Irish scholar based at a university in Ireland. It’s a recognition of what you might call the entangled art histories that link Britain and Ireland. Lucy: My involvement goes back several
Previous pages a detail from: Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery, in which a Lamp is put in the Place of the Sun, exhibited 1766, oil on canvas, Derby Museums Trust.
years. An earlier iteration of the British Art Network was set up by Tate in 2011, and I was invited to the inaugural planning meeting. Then, in 2014, I worked with colleagues from Tate and elsewhere to deliver a special seminar day with the Network, around the challenges and the opportunities of managing single-artist collections such as our Joseph Wright of Derby collection at Derby Museums. We had speakers from the Hepworth Wakefield, the Watts Gallery, and Gainsborough’s House—a really fantastic and broad range. It’s nice to be involved in the reactivation of the Network now and contribute to its development. Baillie: Why is now an important moment to reactivate the Network? Research is central to curatorship, but how is that influenced by cuts to funding? Lucy: We’re working in challenging times, so it strikes me that sharing the outcomes of strategic, practice-based research is important. The Network is partly a forum for critiquing, questioning, and sharing ideas about how to survive in this sector and how to support curators. There are pressing questions of curatorial sustainability—both in terms of finding sources of funding, but also in how we advocate for what curators do in an environment when “curatorship” is subject to multiple and changing interpretations in the media, and the curatorial role is at risk. Fiona: Most of us who work in a publicly funded context have many practical, administrative, and educational duties alongside academic research. The
Network is useful in two key ways: one is by funding these curatorial gatherings and conferences and fostering thought-led encounters and dialogue. The other, that I hope may have a more longitudinal stretch, is championing curatorial research and the extraordinary depth of work happening beyond academia. The research required even just to stage an exhibition makes a huge contribution to scholarship but sometimes that gets lost because they are transitory—there isn’t necessarily the funding for a publication. The Network will allow people to come into contact and share that expertise. Baillie: I know that events which bring about in-person conversation are central to the Network. Could you speak about the impact of ones you’ve participated in previously? Lucy: The seminar we organised in 2014 probably stimulated more questions than it answered, which was a good thing, because we were testing the waters. We had an ambition to create a centre of excellence that would highlight the work of Joseph Wright of Derby, and the seminar cultivated really frank and honest discussions with colleagues. They had different experiences and skills, and pushed us to clarify our goals and pursue a feasibility study; and we found opportunities for collaboration and future partnerships. Baillie: So a level of informality in those conversations is useful? Lucy: Absolutely. Being able to explore and share a hunch and have people respond in
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an honest manner and give you feedback, knowing you are not presenting the polished result or a refined idea, is incredibly useful. From a personal point of view, strengthening relationships with other institutions and being able to pick up the phone and say “we’ve got this particular challenge—do you have any relevant experience?” is an invaluable kind of informality. It lives up to its name as a network. Baillie: How does that network reach beyond London, into the regions as well as internationally? Fiona: I think my presence on the Steering Committee is a recognition that British art exists locally, in physical objects within the United Kingdom, but also exists globally in collections and expertise beyond Britain. It acknowledges that we might trouble or question ideas of British identity, through understanding the history of changing geographies that have defined and redefined what Britain means. That’s very important—if you’re a scholar working on, for instance, James Barry, you’ll know that he was born in Cork but established his career in London in the eighteenth century. Another example, recently profiled in The Guardian, is the artist Harry Clarke, who trained in Dublin, worked as an illustrator in London, and then returned to practice in Ireland during the emergence of the Irish Free State. In aesthetic terms, his work was influenced by the artist Aubrey Beardsley but is arguably very connected to a kind of Celtic imagination. There are really
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interesting pushes and pulls, which need to be examined collectively—we can’t do it from within our own national histories, and we certainly can’t do it within our isolated geographic spaces. Lucy: I’m pleased to have been invited as one of six regional representatives—I think this shows the Network’s commitment to address more specific regional challenges in curating, one of which, for Derby Museums, is how to work internationally. We recognise that we face issues of confidence and gaps in that particular skills base. The potential for collaboration is exciting, because it could help us to fill those gaps and form international partnerships through the combined expertise and experiences of the Network. To echo Fiona’s point, that’s particularly relevant for our work on Joseph Wright of Derby because he’s an internationally renowned artist. The Enlightenment context of his work has a resonance in Europe and America, and lends opportunities to look at those things which connect us across countries and continents. It’s incredibly broad and we are thinking of him not necessarily purely as an artist of the British School, but as an artist who was selling his work to international clients and following ideas being shared across the globe. It’s exciting to think about the Network eventually expanding even further to reflect those sorts of connections.
Harry Clarke, Queens (the Queens of Sheba, Meath and Connaught), nine glass panels acided, stained and painted, illustrating J.M. Synge’s poem, 1917, paint on glass, 30.5 x 18.4 cm. Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images
Strawberry Hill’s
Missing Portrait Silvia Davoli, Research Curator for the recent Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill exhibition, describes her search for a renowned painting that was once part of Horace Walpole’s celebrated collection. Lost Treasures was supported by a Curatorial Research Grant and a Publication Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre.
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H
orace Walpole’s (1676–1745) collection was one of the most important of the eighteenth century but it was dispersed in a great sale in 1842. The exhibition Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill (October 2018–February 2019), held at Strawberry Hill House and Garden, reunited over 150 objects from this famous and unique collection in Walpole’s former house in Twickenham, situated among
by Walpole to the Flemish artist Paul van Somer, had found its way to the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation in Houston, Texas. Careful archival research, however, has demonstrated that there are in fact two nearly identical versions of the same painting, and that Lord Falkland’s portrait originally at Strawberry Hill remains untraced. Despite the long distance between London and Houston, and the significant
David Nicholls, Twickenham: Strawberry Hill.
the interiors as he designed it. As an art historian and provenance researcher, I helped to assemble the list of exhibits, which meant tracking down missing works and verifying the provenance for each loan. But in the course of my research, an iconic portrait long considered as having come from Strawberry Hill—which we intended to be a highlight of the exhibition—suddenly had to be struck from our list. Scholars had always assumed that Portrait of Henry Carey Lord Falkland, which was painted in 1603 and attributed
costs of transport, we had initially been particularly excited to include this painting in the exhibition. It was part of a set of four full-length Elizabethan portraits that Walpole had bought expressly for his gallery at Strawberry Hill. It had, moreover, inspired one of Walpole’s most influential literary inventions: the scene in his gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), in which a portrait comes to life. Manfred, lord of the castle, has just declared his intention to divorce his wife and offered himself to his daughter-in-law, when he witnesses the
Marcus Geeraerts (1561-1635), Portrait of Henry Carey, Lord Falkland, Deputy of Ireland, (c.1575-1633), c.1762, oil on canvas, 215 x 127 cm, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, Houston, Texas (BF/1985.19).
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painting of his grandfather “quit its panel, and descend on the floor with a grave and melancholy air”. This trope of a figure stepping out from a painting had important consequences in the gothic literary canon. Walpole’s scene popularised the notion that paintings could play an active, and tantalisingly sinister, role in the narrative. Its echoes are found in the conceit, employed by writers such as Mary Shelley, that what is lifeless can suddenly live; and in a narrative like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which turns art into life and vice versa. The portrait is mentioned in Walpole’s detailed Description of the Villa, an inventory made in 1774, as “Henry Carey Lord Falkland, deputy of Ireland, and father of the famous Lucius lord Falkland; in white by Van Somers.” Unfortunately, despite its importance, there is no mention of the picture’s provenance in Walpole’s copious correspondence. The next fixed point in its journey is recorded in the catalogue of the great sale of 1842, which notes that the painting was sold to a John Tollemache Esq. of Helmingham Hall. It seems he wished to share it with the public, as a copy of the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition catalogue also records the portrait, loaned from his collection, as piece number 41 in the British Portrait Gallery. To illuminate the next stage of the portrait’s life, I conducted a close study of the Helmingham Hall dossier and a file corresponding to Falkland’s portraits at the Heinz Archive and Library at the National Portrait Gallery in London. At the Heinz, through the study of archival photographs documenting the painting
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and consideration of the correspondence amassed over decades, I discovered that the portrait now at the Blaffer Foundation in Houston had arrived there together with its companion portrait, Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland (dated 1620 and attributed to Paul van Somer). Both had come directly from the Falkland family where they had been held, as confirmed by the current Lord Falkland, continuously for more than three centuries. Comparing old black and white images of Walpole’s Lord Falkland with the portrait now in Houston, it becomes apparent that the two are almost identical. Very minor differences are found in details such as the rendering of the hat, the fabric of the coat, and the cape. Is Walpole’s iconic portrait therefore an eighteenth-century copy? As its current location is unknown, this question remains unanswered. Ultimately, I found that Walpole’s version of the painting was kept by Tollemache and sold by his heirs in 1953. Its last recorded owner was Margaret “Daisy” Van Allen Bouquiere (d. 1969), an American socialite and art collector from Long Island. After that, the portrait reached England again and its traces were lost. It has been suggested that the portrait was eventually purchased by Nancy Lancaster (d. 1994), the famous interior decorator, who reportedly had the portrait hanging in one of her living rooms at Halsey Court together with similar images of subjects all dressed in white silk. But all this is yet to be confirmed. In staging the exhibition, we left an empty space where once the Portrait of Lord Falkland hung—we hope that, with attention drawn by the recent show and our discoveries, the lost portrait will resurface.
Frontispiece, A Catalogue of the Classic Contents of Strawberry Hill Collected by Horace Walpole, 1842, London: Smith and Robins.
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Joseph Constantine Stadler, The Gallery at Strawberry Hill, no date, aquatint on paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
The Gallery at Strawberry Hill during the exhibition Lost Treasures of Strawberry Hill: Masterpieces from Horace Walpole’s Collection, 20 October 2018 to 24 February 2019.
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New Books Summer 2019
Gothic Sculpture Paul Binski
In this beautifully illustrated study, Paul Binski offers a new account of sculpture in England and northwestern Europe between c.1000 and 1500, in which he examines Romanesque and Gothic art as a form of persuasion. Binski discusses a wide variety of stone and wood sculpture from such places as Wells, Westminster, Compostela, Reims, Chartres and Naumburg. He argues that medieval sculpture not only conveyed information but also created experiences in the thinking and feeling subjects who formed its audience. Without rejecting the intellectual ambitions of Gothic art, Binski suggests that surface effects, ornament, colour, variety and contrast served a number of purposes. In a critique of recent affective and materialist accounts of sculpture and allied arts, he proposes that all materials are shaped by human intentionality and artifice, and have a ‘poetic’. Exploring the imagery of growth, change, decay and the powers of fear and pleasure, Binski breaks new ground in art-historical scholarship, allowing us to use the language and ideas of the Middle Ages in the close reading of artefacts. Publication date: May 2019 Dimensions: 256 x 192 mm Pages: 304 Illustrations: 106
Paul Binski
GOTHIC SCULPTURE
val de
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GOTHIC SCULPTURE Paul Binski
GOTHIC SCULPTUR
In this beautifully illustrated study, Paul Binski offers a new account of sculpture in England a northwestern Europe between c.1000 and 1500 examining Romanesque and Gothic art as a fo of persuasion. Binski discusses a wide variety o stone and wood sculpture from such places as W Westminster, Compostela, Reims, Chartres and Naumburg. He argues that medieval sculpture conveyed information but also created experie in the thinking and feeling subjects who forme audience. Without rejecting the intellectual am of Gothic art, Binski suggests that surface effec ornament, colour, variety and contrast served a number of purposes. In a critique of recent affe and materialist accounts of sculpture and allied he proposes that all materials are shaped by hu intentionality and artifice, and have a ‘poetic’. Exploring the imagery of growth, change, deca the powers of fear and pleasure, Binski breaks n ground in art-historical scholarship, allowing u the language and ideas of the Middle Ages in t reading of artefacts.
uis
all ISBN 978-0-300-24143-3
Published for the Paul Mellon Centre 9 780300 241433
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Studies in British Art
Inventing Boston Design, Production, and Consumption 1680–1720 Edward S. Cooke, Jr. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Boston was both a colonial capital and the third most important port in the British empire, trailing only London and Bristol. Boston was also an independent entity that pursued its own interests and articulated its own identity while selectively appropriating British culture and fashion. This revelatory book examines period dwellings, gravestones, furniture, textiles, ceramics, and silver, revealing through material culture how the inhabitants of Boston were colonial, provincial, metropolitan, and global, all at the same time. Edward Cooke’s detailed account of materials and furnishing practices demonstrates that Bostonians actively filtered ideas and goods from a variety of sources, combined them with local materials and preferences, and constructed a distinct sense of local identity, a process of hybridization that, the author argues, exhibited a conscious desire to shape a culture as a means to resist a distant, dominant power.
Publication date: May 2019 Dimensions: 270 x 230 mm Pages: 232 Illustrations: 205
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Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 Edited by Erika Balsom, Lucy Reynolds and Sarah Perks Over the last three decades the moving image has grown from a marginalised medium of British art into one of the nation’s most vital areas of artistic practice. How did we get here? Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 seeks to provide answers, unfolding some of the narratives – disparate, entwined and often colourful – that have come to define this field. Ambitious in scope, this anthology considers artists and artworks alongside the organisations, institutions and economies in which they exist. Writings by scholars from both art history and film studies, curators from diverse backgrounds and artists from across generations offer a provocative and multifaceted assessment of the evolving position of the moving image in the British art world and consider the effects of numerous technological, institutional and creative developments.
Publication date: September 2019 Dimensions: 230 x 260 mm Pages: 560 Illustrations: 200
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Witnessing Slavery Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition Sarah Thomas Gathering together over 160 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints, this book offers an unprecedented examination of the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840. In addition to considering how the work of artists such as Agostino Brunias, James Hakewill and Augustus Earle responded to abolitionist politics, Sarah Thomas examines the importance of the eyewitness account in endowing visual representations of transatlantic slavery with veracity. ‘Being there’, indeed, became significant not only because of the empirical opportunities to document slave life it afforded, but also because the imagery of the eyewitness was more credible than sketches and paintings created by the ‘armchair traveler’ at home. Full of original insights that cast a new light on these highly charged images, this volume reconsiders how slavery was depicted within a historical context in which truth was a deeply contested subject. Publication date: September 2019 Dimensions: 270 x 216 mm Pages: 320 Illustrations: 165
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
Events
Summer Calendar All events are at the Paul Mellon Centre unless otherwise indicated.
17 May, 13.00-14.00
31 May, 13.00-14.00
Research Lunch
Research Lunch
3 May, 13.00-14.00
The Hearth and the Inferno: LCC
Audio Arts Archive: From
Research Lunch
Fire Safety Displays at the Ideal
Inventory Space to Imagined
‘Mannered beauty and theatric
Home Exhibition, 1958-63
Space
grace’: Guido Reni and the Royal
Alistair Cartwright
Lucia Farinati
22 May, 18.00-20.00
June 2019
May 2019
Academy Amy Parrish
Research Seminar 8 May, 18.00-20.00
Gillray in Grub Street: Some
5 June, 18.00-20.00
Research Seminar
Episodes from the 1780s
Research Seminar
“The sense of sight which is very
Tim Clayton
Architecture sub judice: Ugliness,
keen”: English history as shown
Law, and Public Opinion
in 1580s Rome
22 May, 13.00-21.00
Carol Richardson
Symposium and screening
Timothy Hyde
The Ballet of the Nations:
7 June, 10.00-18.30
10 May, 09.30 - 18.00
Dance, Art and History
Workshop
Doctoral Researchers Network
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in
Alfred Cohen: An American Vision
Summer Symoosium
British Art and Birkbeck
of Britain and Europe
10 May, 18.00-20.00
29 May 10.00-17.30
14 June, 13.00-14.00
Doctoral Researchers Network
Workshop
Research Lunch
Summer Social
Art + Feminism: Edit-a-thon
Between Art and Science: British and Chinese ‘hybrid’ Botanic Art in Eighteenth-century Canton Josepha Richard
Film still, Life in the Elephant, written and directed by Lynda Nead and John Wyver; courtesy Illuminations. 26
19 June, 18.00-20.00 Research Seminar Summerson and the Search for the Primitive in the Inter-War Period Elizabeth McKellar 26 June, 18.00-20.30 PMC Book Night Authors: Elizabeth Goldring Paul Binksi Colin Thom Olivia Fryman
July 2019 3-6 July Bedford Square Festival
Detail from: Bradby Blake, Manuscript illustrations, Oak Spring Garden Foundation January 2016 — No. 5
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3 - 6 July 2019 www.bedfordsquarefestival.co.uk
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January 2019 2019 —— No. No. 1111 January
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YCBA Exhibitions and Events 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06520 USA
8 May, 17.30
Exhibitions
Events
9 May - 11 August 2019
1 May, 17.30
Eileen Hogan: Personal
Eileen Hogan: Personal
Theatrical Performance
Geographies
Geographies
The Flower of Caledonia
Eileen Hogan, artist
Nicholas McGegan, baroque
This event will be streamed live.
Opening Lecture
30 May – 25 August 2019
music specialist and Music
Tony Foster: Watercolor Diaries,
Director, Philharmonia Baroque
8 June, 14.00
Cornwall to Colorado
Orchestra & Chorale; Thomas
Opening Conversation
Cooley.
A Conversation with Tony Foster Duncan Robinson, former
Photographs | Contemporary Art:
2 May, 17.00
director of the Center and of the
Recent Gifts and Acquisitions
Film Screening and Book Signing
Fitzwilliam Museum, University of
Citizen Lane (2018)
Cambridge, and the artist Tony
16 August – 1 December 2019
Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan.
Foster.
Peterloo and Protest
The film will be introduced by
This event will be streamed live.
20 June – 8 September 2019
Morna O’Neill, who will sign copies of her new book, Hugh
19 June, 17.30
Lane: The Art Market and the
Opening Panel
Art Museum, 1893–1915 after the
Photographs | Contemporary
screening.
Art: Recent Gifts and Acquisitions
Detail from: Eileen Hogan, Chelsea Physic Garden 2, 8 September 2016, 2018, oil, wax, and charcoal on paper, mounted on board, Collection of the artist © Eileen Hogan 2018 To stay connected and learn more about the Center’s programmes, visit britishart.yale.edu.
January 2019 2016 — No. 11 5
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